Crowdsourced Film Turns Visitors’ Drawings Into A Museum Piece [Video]

Crowdsourcing has become a popular trend, making the audience part of the creative process. While the most common use of crowdsourcing is for funding projects, like on Kickstarter, visitors at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam join an on-going project by adding to it directly.

Your Line or Mine is a collaborative project created by Amsterdam-based design studio Moniker which encourages visitors to create a design by connecting dots with straight lines on a piece of colored paper. After creating their design, guests scan their paper at the table and watch as it is automatically added to the animation on-screen.

Each piece of paper has a barcode that links it to the specific movie and frame it belongs to, so the computer knows exactly where it needs to be placed. The exhibit uses a Mac Mini to process the sheets and project the whole film with the added frame, which is then added to Vimeo. While there is no way to attribute authorship of a frame to any particular visitor, this lack of distinction is part of the appeal. The result of the crowdsourcing is thousands of frames from individuals of different ages, races and nationalities coming together in a common goal, blurring human boundaries for an expanding, all accepting animation.

At the time of writing, the project is at 83% completion. If you’d like to add your own frame to this grand collaboration, you have until August 10th, 2014 to visit the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.